


Giftfic 6

by Dreadmartha



Category: Intermission - Fandom, Mobsterswitch - Fandom, Problem Sleuth - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Implied dicks, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 18:32:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadmartha/pseuds/Dreadmartha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something about Inny and Scoff’s early relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Giftfic 6

“What is this?”

“What’s what?”

“This noise, what the hell is it?”

“Noise? Woman, this is the Supremes. It’s not noise, it’s music.”

That was just like Doxy, to be so contrary about music. She was a great girl and all, but when it came to good music she was dumb as a shack of hammers.

“You and your damn music, they sound like a bunch of howling monkeys.”

“Doxy, I swear to god.”

If she were anyone else you’d slap her, right now.

“If you were anyone else I’d slap you, right now.”

“Yeah, I’d like to see you try.”

You would too, but you were raised better than that.

“You don’t gotta listen if you don’t want to, Jesus.”

“I don’t, so turn it off already.”

“Hold on now, I said you didn’t have to, never said I was turning it off.”

“Going out of my head,” the radio comments.

“Over yoooou,” you sing along.

Doxy reaches around you to turn it off. You block her, still singing.

“Goin’ outta my head, over you, girl,”

She frowns in that way that means she’s definitely not laughing, and shifts around from side to side like a basketball player, trying to get around you. You block her, which isn’t hard but you go the extra mile to put up some good defense.

Doxy grabs you by your suspenders and pulls you over for a kiss. Then she snaps them, which hurts like a son of a bitch because you aren’t wearing a shirt.

“Christ, woman.”

She laughs and gets around you, turns the radio off.

“Wouldn’t’ve hurt so much if your tits weren’t hanging out like that.”

Your name is Peccant Scofflaw and your weight is appropriate and attractive.

You shake your head and turn back to the stove.

“You don’t know how good you have it. You got Bawd to go shopping with, Delinquent to carry all your piles and piles of stuff around, and poor ole me to make you breakfast.”

“Bawd’s no style, Delinquent is a slob and you,” she pokes you appropriate and attractive belly, “have burned the eggs.”

You have, at least on the one side. The other side is a little pale, so it’s no big deal.

“It builds character, Doxy. Don’t you want an omelet with some panache?”

“I want an omelet, Scoff, not soot.”

“Picky, picky.”

She doesn’t like that, same way she doesn’t like getting called nosy or gossipy. That’s one of your favorite things about Doxy, she doesn’t stand gossip. That gives you SO much more room to do it. Other girls you were with would be gossip crazy, and they ended up upstaging you. Not Doxy, no, no. Whenever Bawd or one of her other friends drop in you get to strut your stuff and talk talk talk.

“I’m not picky. I just know what I want.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say, honey.”

“Don’t test me, Scofflaw.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You don’t want to test me.”

“No ma’am.”

“Stop that.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She goes to snap you suspenders again but you’re ready for her and you hook an arm around her neck, not tight but enough that it’s sort of a headlock. She fusses, pushing on your arm and talking Irish. You reply with a falsetto,

“Goin’ outta my head, over you baby, outta my head, over you girl!”

And at that point she’s laughing instead of cursing. You let her go, no harm done, and serve up the omelet.

“Madame,” you present her with the plate.

“Burnt,” she replies, and kisses you on the cheek. You roll your eyes and give her a pinch when she turns around.

“Any plans for today?” You ask.

“A few, why?”

You pour yourself another cup of coffee.

“I don’t got that much to take care of, thought we might got catch a movie or something.”

She hums appreciatively, which might be because she likes that idea or it might be because you’re such a great cook and that omelet is the best thing she ever ate.

“Sure, sounds fine. When?”

“This afternoon, around four or five.”

“I thought you didn’t have that much to do.”

“I don’t, just need to talk to Innovator and check out a warehouse downtown.”

“And that’s going to take all day?”

“C’mon, you know how Innovator gets. It takes him a half an hour to get one word out. And he’s always moving around, I gotta find his damn apartment first.”

“Why don’t you try looking for him at Rhinehart’s?”

It’s an innocent question, but something about the way she asks bugs you. Like she knows something you two don’t need to talk about, something she wants you to know she’s okay with.

“Why the hell would he be there?” Rhinehart’s is your absolute favorite bar, down in the German part of town. You haven’t taken it over, the way you have with whatever else you liked in town, because that would just be a disservice to the owner, who’s this giant German guy who’s at least a thousand years old and weighs three hundred pounds. He runs the place better than you, a mobster with several years running an empire under your belt, could.

“Oh, I don’t know.” she’s lying, no, worse, she back peddling.

“Why’d you say that?”

“You said he was the one who first took you there, I remember.”

Doxy is an alright liar, but she needs to get her stories straighter. Innovator is a tee-totaler if ever there was one, and she knows that. And he’d never be smart enough to find a place as great as Rhinehart’s. She’s covering.

“Doxy what are you talking about?”

“I just want you to find him faster, I don’t want to go out that late for a movie.”

“Five is not that late.”

“Well there’s lots better things to do at five than going to the movies.”

You two get down to discussing what better things one can do than go to a movie at five, until you finally make the argument that work is work and you can’t depend on a timetable worth shit when you’re working with someone like Innovator.

She concedes that that is true.

Five it is, then.

——

it takes hours to find where Innovator’s moved to, and when you do find it he’s not at home. He never tells anyone where he’s moving to, bad he only hints at when he’ll move again. Better still, he doesn’t have any kind of pattern to when he moves. The places are always pretty cheap, even though you make sure he gets a decent cut of the Scoundrels’ earnings. You try to be a fair leader, mostly because you don’t want the strongest man in the world coming after you, or to have Innovator go running to the police.

Innovator isn’t the type of guy who enjoys cheap living, which makes it hard to understand the shitty apartments he stays in. Until you remember that this is Innovator you’re dealing with, and that he’s probably left all of his money in shoeboxes under the floorboards of all his different apartments.

One of these days you’re going to set him up a bank account, whether or not he wants one.

For all that he’s a genius, he’s pretty damn stupid. If he weren’t so good with the magic stuff you’d have dropped him years ago. Magic is really all he’s good for, though he does occasionally come up with some gadgets that are pretty useful. As long as they don’t break.

He’s a weird one, Pernicious Innovator. But he has his uses, just like anybody else. For one thing, he makes a pretty good punching bag. And he’s a better stress reliever than those freaky little foam things with the buggy outy eyes.

That’s how you would classify what you do with him. You can’t come home to Doxy all full of piss and vinegar, and there’s really no way you’d try and take it out on Delinquent. Innovator, though, he’s a much better candidate.

You’re not really into the rough stuff, and you’re definitely not into guys, but most of the time you end up buttoning your pants before leaving.

It’s a relief, really, some kind of muscular thing more than a sex though. The sex is just part of it. And it’s not all that great, by your usual standards.

Innovator seems to enjoy himself, in whatever roundabout way a guy can enjoy getting fucked.

Today’s not one of those days, today it’s just business. Usually you’re coming off of a job when you end up over here for personal stuff. Or you call him and tell him to meet you somewhere. Usually a good bar.

That’s another weird thing about him, the man built himself a phone and hooked it into the airwaves or phone waves or whatever. He carries it around with him all the time. Never changes the number or anything. Like his little contraption is impervious or something. All it’d take was one cop with one of those things they use for wire tapping and he’d be sunk.

By then, you guess, he’d be in deep shit anyway because he keeps iron the inside most layer of all his clothes.

You wait for him for about forty-five minutes, in case he went to buy milk or something. He doesn’t show, so you set back out to check on your warehouse. The Fuzz raided another gang’s place real nearby, so you wanna make sure that everything you got going on in the neighborhood is nice and legal.

It’s a warehouse full of Cuban cigars. No worries.

——

It’s been a while since you called Innovator up, things have been good. This is one of those peacetimes for the city, they come around every couple years. The younger gangs feel like they’ve proved themselves, the older gangs have dropped their feuds with each other for a while, and you’ve been keeping the pigs in donuts, so they’re no problem.

All you need to worry about are your old friends the Meddlesome Company, and Deadeye likes to keep them busy with other things when he can’t get enough evidence to prove in a court of law that you had anything to do with that guy he found in the elevator shaft in their office building.

Times like these you really don’t know what Delinquent and Innovator get up to, and in all honesty you don’t care. As long as you don’t get roped in.

They’re big boys, they can look after themselves.

You’re lying next to Doxy, she’s asleep on your shoulder. Times like this, you kill for them.

And this time around you think it’ll last a while.

Maybe long enough for you to get out of the business, out of town too.

Settle with Doxy some place, maybe back in Connecticut, maybe all the way back in Ireland. County Cork.

You’ve never been out of the states. You’d like to go, now that you think about it.

That’d be pretty great, actually.

——

Rhinehart’s is not the place you want to be. You don’t want to be here, sipping a beer that’s far too bitter for you, even though it’s apparently a light brew. You don’t want the old man who’s twice your size and from Munich to be glaring at you for showing up so much and buying so little.

You don’t mean to be rude. You just can’t deal with liquor. Even rubbing alcohol worries you.

But you’re not going to tell him that. It would only make him angrier. Germans do not take kindly to perspectives different from their own.

You’ve been coming here every day for weeks, having to sit here and wait. You can’t sit at the window for fear that someone like Deadeye would spot you passing by. Sitting in the back isn’t so bad, but the long walk to the front at closing time puts how alone you’ve been all day on display for the bartender and the giant from Munich.

They get definitive proof that you’re unwanted, that your attempt to be on-hand has failed, that the one person who would tell you to meet him here has refused to show up.

You can’t stand to go home to your cold little apartment, with the ratty curtains and the thin mattress. Why do you even consider it an option? It’s not a home, it will never be.

Not even a place you can go to sleep in. You lie there, staring at the ceiling and wish your eyes would close, rather than just be unbearably heavy.

Your phone doesn’t ring, you’re head hurts, and you need to pee. But that’s not a good enough reason to get up and possibly miss Peccant Scofflaw coming in looking for you.

Doxy saw you here maybe a week ago now, so you know Scofflaw knows you’re here. You’re not fond of Doxy, but she seems to understand your presence there. And that’s about all you can ask of her.

But Scofflaw refuses to show up.

You run through your recent activities time and again, but find nothing that should have upset your leader. Things are going well. So why would he give you the cold shoulder like this?

You can only imagine it’s simply because he realizes you don’t love him. Not for lack of trying.

Being here at all should be proof enough that you’re willing to have him love you, which in turn would make you love him.

But what’s that matter if he refuses to show up?

You can’t help the fact that he hates everyone but the man in mirror. You wish you could, but Scofflaw is stuck in his ways.

If the most you can do for him is help him relax, you can work with that.

But you can’t convince yourself that you don’t like feeling needed, for once. Or, needed and actually coming through for someone.

And if making him love you by sitting in a bar is what it takes you’ll do it. If chancing being recognized, reported, raided, arrested, manhandled, interrogated and then shipped off to jail is what it takes you’ll risk that.

Because you never thought you can be useful to someone before. And you’ll do anything to not have to give that up.

A big German hand on your shoulder sends your train of thought screaming into a ravine. You turn, swallowing spit rather than beer, which you know makes the giant old man behind you angrier.

“Oh, alright,” You know when you’re not wanted, when you stand on the very edge of someone’s patience and have a toe over the line. You just can’t seem to stop that from happening.

You get up off your stool and walk out, pulling your collar up around you face. It barely reaches the corner of your jaw, leaving you face in full view. What’s the point of pulling it up anyway?

It’s cold outside but you need to stay local. You pick a spot two doors down and sit there, watching the people around you for tell-tale Scofflaw signs. The wind picks up, you pull your giant overcoat tighter. It’s full of holes, but over layers of other clothes you can pretend it’s warm.

You put your head and try to keep your eyes open. You know this neighborhood like the back of your hand. You recognize people, who recognize you as the bum who they only ever saw in the bar. Now they are justified, you are a tramp. Not just some hunched figure to be pitied through the windows at Rhinehart’s, but a real man fallen on hard times. You’ve gone from being on exhibition to real life, from being ogled to being avoided. Like any work of art, you suppose.

Your eyes won’t stay open. You head hurts from watching so much. It’s bitter cold out here.

You’ll

You’ll rest them, just for a second.

Just a second.


End file.
